Searching for a New Freedom

searching for a newA freedom Companion to African American History499 Edited by Alton Hornsby, Jr Copyright © 2005 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd Chapter Twenty-nine Searching for a New Freedom HASAN KWAME JEFFRIES In the immediate aftermath of emancipation, the lives of former bondsmen and bondswomen failed to meet their basic expectations. Quite simply, their lives too closely resembled the status quo antebellum. Indeed, African Americans remained landless, lacked ownership of the fruits of their labor, lost the vote (through elec- toral fraud and discriminatory changes to state constitutions) shortly after they had received it, and were subject to vicious, vulgar, and random acts of racial terrorism as a result of the federal government being more interested in protecting the southern economy than in protecting black folk. In response, African Americans organized to implement their vision of freedom, which differed substantially from that of white southerners and white northerners. By agitating for their civil and human rights, especially for good-quality education, political participation, personal safety, and control of their own labor, the former slaves launched the fight for racial justice that continues to this day (Harding 1981). The most important link in this intergenerational struggle is the modern Civil Rights Movement. It represents the most highly organized manifestation of African Americans’ post-emancipation search for a new freedom and, if measured narrowly in legislative terms, the most successful. Popular interest in the Civil Rights Movement has swelled during the last two decades. Evidence of this trend is the surge in the number of feature-length films that explore aspects and events of the civil rights era, such as Freedom Song and Boycott. The extensive media coverage given to the trials and convictions of whites involved in the 1963 murders of Medgar Evers and the four little girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing also reflects this trend. Academics have also paid increasing attention to the Black Freedom Struggle. In fact, their interest in the movement has fueled popular interest in it. In the years since 1990, the literature on the movement has grown substantially (Fairclough 1990; Lawson 1991). In the process, scholars have altered their general analytic framework, relying less on top- down, “great man” perspectives, and more on bottom-up, grassroots approaches. They have also broadened their subjects of inquiry, ranging beyond dramatic mobil- izing events to examine community organizing (Eagles 1986; Robinson and Sullivan ACTC29 499 22/09/2005, 6:02 PM 500 hasan kwame jeffries 1991; Lawson and Payne 1998; Davis 2000). Consequently, movement scholarship has become much richer and more complex. This chapter focuses on the evolution of civil rights inquiry over the last quarter- century. It discusses and analyzes the major shifts in the subjects that historians study. It also looks at the ways the latest analytic approaches to studying social movements have caused scholars to look anew at civil rights events, activists, and organizations. This chapter also identifies and considers areas of the Black Freedom Struggle that remain understudied. The origin of the Civil Rights Movement has been the focus of intense scholarly debate. Initially, historians tended to locate the starting point of the Black Free- dom Struggle in the mid-1950s, arguing that the movement began when the US Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas in 1954 that de jure segregated education was inherently unequal and unconstitutional (Kluger 1975). For these scholars, the primary catalysts behind the movement were the usual arbiters of power. They argue that the judicial branch of the federal government, followed later by the executive and legislative branches, led the charge for social change (Sitkoff 1978; Weisbrot 1991). The push to acknowledge African American agency started a gradual shift in the discourse on movement origins. Rather than Brown, scholars began to point to the Montgomery bus boycott and the emergence of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr in 1955 as having jumpstarted civil rights struggles (Garrow 1986; Branch 1988). As a result, many scholars centered their studies of the movement around the life and protest activities of the Atlanta-born preacher. Taylor Branch, for example, situates his award-winning works on the Civil Rights Movement wholly around King’s public life (Branch 1988, 1998). David Garrow and Adam Fairclough examine King’s personal life during his public years even more closely; Garrow accomplishes this by making effective use of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) surveillance records (Garrow 1983, 1986; Fairclough 1995a). More recently, historian Clayborne Carson has edited several volumes of King’s personal papers. Although Carson is less committed to a King-centered understanding of the movement’s beginning and evolution, he argues forthrightly for King’s centrality to the Black Freedom Struggle (Carson 1992–2000, 1998). Sociologist Aldon Morris complicates the Montgomery–King starting point slightly by beginning his exploration and analysis of the movement’s origin with the 1953 Baton Rouge bus boycott. Like the aforementioned scholars, however, he centers the bulk of his study on the protest activities of King and the resource networks of black ministers (Morris 1984). In the years since 1990, increased awareness of the power of ordinary people – the proverbial grassroots – to make the decisions that most affect their lives has prompted scholars to challenge the idea that the Civil Rights Movement began with the bus boycotts of the 1950s and the emergence of King. Robin D. G. Kelley and Eric Arnesen look at organized black protest among southern sharecroppers and railroad workers as antecedents to the civil rights struggles of the 1950s (Kelley 1990; Arnesen 2001). Kelley also points to indi- vidual grassroots protest during the Second World War era as evidence of the need to push back the movement’s starting point (Kelley 1994). Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein (1988), Michael Honey (1993), and Bruce Nelson (1993), for their part, test the normative narrative of the movement’s origin by examining the ACTC29 500 22/09/2005, 6:02 PM searching for a new freedom 501 intersection of black struggles for equality and southern labor organizing in the 1940s. Interestingly enough, scholars who position white powerbrokers as the leading catalysts behind the Black Freedom Struggle have also divined earlier roots for the movement. Patricia Sullivan (1996), for example, locates the origins of the Civil Rights Movement in the liberal politics of New Deal southerners. Others have suggested that a liberal ethos permeated the late 1940s and sparked the movement by creating a popular consensus for progressive social change. As evidence, they point to the publication of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma and the Truman Administration’s statement on civil rights To Secure These Rights (Lawson and Payne 1998). Scholars questioning this analytic trend note that the machinations of Washington insiders had only a limited impact on everyday black life, particularly in the rural South, even during the height of the New Deal. They also point out that Red-baiting McCarthyites and massive white resistance in the wake of Brown together limited the space available for public criticism and social activism, extin- guishing post-war liberal sentiment and retarding rather than sparking black protest (Klarman 1994; Payne 1995; Lawson and Payne 1998; Dudziak 2000). Understandings of the origins of the Civil Rights Movement have significantly shaped the study of civil rights organizations. Interest in Brown has sparked a handful of monographs on the NAACP’s strategy to dismantle Jim Crow and on the Howard University lawyers who engineered and executed it (McNeil 1983; Tushnet 1987; Williams 1998). A number of works investigating the nation’s oldest civil rights organization examine aspects of its fight “to reach the conscience of America” such as the crusade against lynching (Zangrando 1980; Goings 1990; Meier and Bracey 1993; Bates 1997). Unfortunately, far fewer studies exist of NAACP opera- tions beyond New York boardrooms and Washington courtrooms. Only in the last decade have historians focused significant attention on the activities of the NAACP’s local branches and local leaders. Notable works in this category are Ray Gavins’ essay on the NAACP in North Carolina during the Jim Crow era, Tim Tyson’s biography of Robert F. Williams, NAACP branch leader in Monroe, North Caro- lina, and most recently John Kirk’s work on black activism in Little Rock, Arkansas, which considers the leadership and struggles of Daisy Bates (Robinson and Sullivan 1991; Tyson 1999; Kirk 2003). As scholars began to look more closely at the bus boycotts of the 1950s and the emergence of Martin Luther King, Jr, they devoted increasing attention to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and King-led SCLC campaigns. King biographers David Garrow and Adam Fairclough have both written impressive organizational histories of SCLC that scrutinize King’s leadership and look closely at the group’s civil rights battles (Garrow 1986; Fairclough 1987). Garrow has also penned a detailed account of SCLC’s involvement in the 1965 voting rights drive in Selma, Alabama (Garrow 1978). Not surprisingly, most treatments of SCLC center on King. A refreshing break from this practice is Andrew Manis’ 1999 biography of Fred Shuttlesworth.

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